Miracle Snacks And Sweets Alberton

[Agenor Ramadan]

TheoBalula didn't have to think about giving his life for his country. He had none. He lived in Thokoza on the East Rand, a township in which some of the worst violence between ANC supporters and hostel residents, all Zulu, was making areas along Khumalo Road, virtual war zones. Like other youths in his community, he was a member of the local street committee that patrolled the neighborhood at night, watching for outsiders to descend and wreak their havoc. Keeping vigil for long parts of the night and going to school for most of the day exerted a toll, but the toll was normal he and his contemporaries simply regarded it as part of the routine of daily life, nothing special about it.

Bennett Balula is not especially political. When I met him he was an auto mechanic working in Alberton, with a wife, Rose, and three children. Bennett was a typical blue-collar worker, but one with a skill. Theo, the eldest was 17 years of age, Priscilla 13, and Kenneth six. Golf, he tells me, used to be sport when he was growing up; but even though he still hits the occasional ball, his real interest is horse racing because betting on horses can yield immediate cash benefits if you pick the right horse. We didn't discuss the consequences of not picking the right horse.

He was not anti-de Klerk; in fact, he admired and respected him for having released Mandela. He was pro ANC, a member, but not a particularly active one, but sure, nevertheless, of his political allegiance. I met Bennett in August 1991, a couple of months before CODESA got off the ground.

The previous year had been a turbulent one in the townships. Although the ANC had suspended its armed struggle in August 1990, violence, especially in the townships that surrounded Johannesburg began to escalate, at first with armed encounters between supporters of the ANC and the IFP, and as the violence began to escalate, it spread like wildfire through the townships on the Eastern Rand. In the months leading to the signing of the Pretoria Minute, twelve were killed in clashes between supporters of the IFP and the ANC in Kagiso, a township west of Johannesburg, and in August, even as the final touches were being put to the agreement, twenty two people were killed in Sebokeng, a township south of Johannesburg.

Interestingly, when I asked members of the PAC, AZAPO, and the BCM who was responsible for the instigation of the violence, they unhesitatingly replied that the ANC was responsible. The conventional wisdom among these organizations was that the ANC was intolerant to any form of opposition to it in Black communities, and that whenever opposition threatened the ANC's standing in a community, it immediately took immediate steps to eliminate emerging opposition.1

The ANC had a different explanation. While it would concede that the IFP were the perpetrators of the violence, they argued that cliques in the security forces were acting in concert with elements in the IFP; that the government was doing nothing to rein in the violence although it had the means to do so; indeed, that the violence was an integral part of the government's strategy to destabilize the ANC in the Black community by exposing its incapacity to protect its own people; on the other hand the government continued to pursue negotiations with the ANC, the assumption being that an ANC increasingly seen to be in ineffective in its own strongholds would be negotiating from a position of weakness, not strength, and thus be more amenable to accepting the proposals the government put ion the table. When de Klerk appeared to shrug off the violence as an intra- Black competition for the allegiance of Blacks, the ANC established self defence units (SDUs) in the townships to protect them from government orchestrated attacks from the IFP, especially the Zulu inhabitants of the hostels that punctuated the bleak terrain, blotches on a barren landscape adding to the ugliness that was a permanent feature of township ambience. But while the ANC sanctioned the formation of the SDUs, it did not control them, with results that would only add to the deadliness of life in locations.

The violence is difficult to bring under control because the animosities that fuel it are themselves the legacy of apartheid and the political intolerance inculcated in the townships. In "The Wretched of the Earth," Franz Fanon describes the frightening escalation of violence that occurs when oppressed people, who must find some outlet for their anger, are forced to turn inward, to add further to their profound sense of victimhood. "The settler pits brute force against the weight of numbers" Fanon writes. "His preoccupation with security makes him remind the native out loud that he alone is master."

The settler keeps alive in the native an anger, which he deprives of outlet. The native is trapped in the tight links of the chains of colonialism. The natives' muscular tension finds outlet regularly in bloodthirsty explosions -- in tribal warfare, in feuds between sects, and in quarrels between individuals. Where individuals are concerned, a positive negation of common sense is evident. While the settler or the policeman has the right the livelong day to strike the native, to insult him and make him crawl to them, you will see the native calling for his knife at the slightest hostile or aggressive glance cast on him by another native.2

"Perception runs ahead of facts." says Andrew Mapheto, the ANC's coordinator. "When comrades hear there is going to be an Inkatha meeting, they assume there's going to be violence. People react to rumors." On the other hand, says Van Zyl Slabbert,

If you are a Zulu hostel dweller [in the Transvaal] you are told you are going to be killed. Fear accounts for the ferocity of the violence. Fear and prejudice are exploited to do the most outrageous things. Inkatha says the Xhosa are there to wipe them out. And the Zulus respond. The hostel system accommodates more than 200,000 single males, a huge number of them Zulus, in 50 crude dormitory blocks in the PWV region alone. Seeing themselves as despised by the urban township residents, they remember they are "a warrior nation.

At mortuaries they pile the corpses outside in the hot sun. There is no more room inside only dozens of sickeningly mutilated bodies lying in rooms. Stony-faced attendants, like robots, escort crying relatives down the rows, past piles of abandoned, bloody clothing, stacked coffins and bored hearse drivers waiting for yet another load. About 90 percent of the bodies remain unclaimed forcing tired policemen to take at least four photographs of each body, assist at the postmortems, take fingerprints and then stack the bodies back in their rows to await a pauper's funeral.4

"The violence in the Transvaal has profoundly affected the decision regarding what kind of process there will be," says Dennis Worrall, co-leader of the Democratic Party. "Until then the ANC and the government were working together. All that is changed. Inkatha is back into it. Black politics has become ethnic politics. The ANC has anti-Zulu overtones. They played the ethnic card and Buthelezi responded."

There is, however, reluctance among pro- ANC supporters to acknowledge that there is a tribal dimension to the killings. "The ethnic element has not been acknowledged" says Khehla Shubane. "Every time there has been a conflict, a reason other than ethnicity is advanced as a cause."

I still don't know Bennett's address, only how to get to his house. All the way down Khumalo road, with the hostels on the right and the matchbox houses on the left. At the little Methodist church on the left hand side of Khumalo you took a left, followed the paved street that had many well-appointed houses, many with additional add-ons, driveways for cars, neatly trimmed lawns, each house standing on its own little parcel of land, everything fenced in subscription for the adage that good fences make for good neighbors. Get to the burned out Shell station, turn right, at which point the paved road gives way to an arid stretch of red sand pounded into some semblance of a street by the constant flow of traffic. Follow the formula 3,2,1; translation: take third left, then second left and finally first left. Maneuver your way past a mountainous stone that straddled what passed for a street and drive right up to the Balula house. Invariably no one was home.

The real difficulty in reaching the Balulas was the fact that they had no telephone: you simply had to go there and hope for the best. Since Thokoza was on the southern (?) perimeter of Johannesburg about 30 miles out it often took several trips to the location before you found anyone at home, sometimes it might be Bennett's wife Rose, sometimes one of the children Theo or Priscilla, and, on occasion, Bennett himself. If Bennett was not home, there was no question of talking to anyone. Talking was Bennett's terrain; he would make the arrangements, set the date, and while he might promise that Rose and the children would be there, too, it soon became clear that they arranged things according to their own calendars.

Compounding problems, especially in the early nineties, was another reality: you could not go into the townships at night if you are white. Not necessarily because you might be in some danger from roving gangs of youth who would be suspicious of the presence of any white person in the location at night, indeed, at any time, but because Africans didn't want to be seen with you when night fell. Questions would be asked. When you lived in a community where the mere asking of a question could lead to ungrounded speculation, then to community-wide rumors and on to "established" fact about why you were consorting with whites, especially after dark, "fact" arrived at in this way could have disastrous consequences.

There were also practical considerations. Once off Khumalo Road there were no streetlights, making navigation virtually impossible. You certainly didn't stop and ask for directions, and it's difficult to get directions to an address you don't have. Besides, in a delicious turn of irony, whites seen in Black areas after dark were presumed to be up to no good.

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